In Swift, the try? keyword converts a call that may throw an error into an optional value. It returns a successful value (.some(T)) or nil (.none). Using try? enables you to incorporate throwing code into guard statements, allowing you to break the error handler chain and leave scope, and into conditional binding for success-specific clauses.

The merits and costs of try? are numerous. It allows you to create more predictable code, especially in completion blocks and playgrounds, but discards errors which are almost always of value to the developer.

A while ago, I created a version of try? that prints. It offered a balance between the desire to retain error information and the need to use optional-based control statements.

Over time, I’ve been tweaking away at this, evolving and refining the idea to get to a point where I could reproduce the overall behavior of both try? and its fatal-error sibling try! while retaining error-handling features. I call this multi-purposed alternative attempt.

My attempt function passively picks up context where a throwing statement executes and provides a default printing error-handler. If you set crashOnError to true, the attempt acts like try! and aborts execution, but only after printing the error that caused this and the source location where the problem originated.

The newest component of attempt is a custom error handler, the one that defaults to printing.  It’s a little overkill, but I like the idea that I can customize the behavior as needed. If you just want to add clean-up and then print, you can call the default handler from the custom one.

An attempt call looks like this in standalone use, with a trailing closure:

attempt {
   let mgr = NSFileManager.defaultManager()
   try mgr.createDirectoryAtPath(
       "/Users/notarealuser",
       withIntermediateDirectories: true,
       attributes: nil)
}

But requires a more traditional argument approach when combined with guard calls that cannot distinguish the trailing closure from their required else clause.

guard let fileContents = attempt(closure: {
    _ -> [NSURL] in
    let url = NSURL(fileURLWithPath: "/Users/notarealuser")
    let mgr = NSFileManager.defaultManager()
    return try mgr.contentsOfDirectoryAtURL(
            url, includingPropertiesForKeys: nil, 
            options: [])
}) else { fatalError("failed") }

The code for attempt follows below or you can visit the wider-scoped CoreError.swift implementation on Github, which adds (updated) contextualization utilities as well. The screaming snake case constants will change soon as the modernized debug identifiers are adopted into Swift.

As always, if you find any issues or have any suggestions, please let me know.